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When Ronaldo Mouchawar was working in a Boston engineering firm he dreamed of moving back to the Arab world. Born and raised in Aleppo, Syria, he had come to the U.S. to study, then got a high-paying job, but he believed he "owed something" to his home region.

It turned out his ticket back was a smart idea at the right time.

He founded Souq.com in 2006 and settled in Dubai, the financial capital of the United Arab Emirates. Now he's the CEO of what's considered the most successful e-commerce site in the region. He recently raised $150 million in capital to expand. The 44-year-old entrepreneur says commerce is part of his DNA.

"I studied engineering, my dad was a really strong trader merchant, so the combo was a no-brainer for me."

Setting up a business in many Arab countries is difficult, which made business-friendly Dubai an obvious base. Internet penetration had reached 20 percent in the UAE by the time he moved there. His e-business took off a few years later when the regional cell phone revolution connected millions more to the net.

"Suddenly, you go from 30 million users to 130 million users" in the Arab world, he says in his glass-walled office in Dubai. This meant potential customers in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. "The Arab world massively embraced mobile technology. There is 70 percent penetration in the Gulf. That was prime territory for us."

A Quiet Transformation

In a region where war, political turmoil and oil prices dominate the headlines, technology quietly is transforming the Middle East, says Mouchawar. He recognized the potential early and is riding the wave. Now, Internet start-up companies in Dubai attract millions of dollars from venture capitalists who come from Silicon Valley and from the Middle East.

"For those of us who sit in the middle of it, we already feel it," says Fadi Ghandour, the founder of Aramex, a logistics company based in Amman, Jordan. He moved his operation to Dubia and spends most days listening to start-up pitches. He's now a full-time investor in a movement he believes will reshape the region.

"You can feel the crescendo," he says. "People will start to feel that energy that you saw in Tahrir Square, in Egypt," he says, referring to an Arab democracy movement that started in 2011. "This is the energy of the start-up community across the region."

Technology is embraced by the young generation in a region where 60% of the population is under 35. "Youth empowerment, this was a driver for us," says Mouchawar.

Jobs for this generation are scare. Youth unemployment is in double digits in all Arab states. Tech jobs can change the statistics by leveling the playing field for educated tech specialists in a part of the world where family connections are often the key to a decent job.

Creating A 'White Friday'

On the day I visit the offices, the workspace for hundreds of young employees is decorated with black and white balloons. The open space floor plan, with the soft clatter of keyboards and clustered meetings, has the vibe of any tech company. But it is striking to see so many young women monitoring computer screens and heading planning meetings.

The balloons?

"It's a very tough day," says Mouchawar, as he gives me a tour, "so just to make sure we have some fun."

There is an all-nighter ahead for the entire team in the countdown to the biggest shopping day of the year. It's a first for Souq.com. Think Black Friday.

Mouchawar rebranded the shopping day. He calls it "White Friday," a more fitting name for Arab culture. "We wanted to own it, to own the brand."

He explains that it makes cultural sense. In the Arab world, Friday is the traditional day of prayer. A "black" Friday doesn't work in Arabic.

In the highly competitive world of e-commerce, Mouchawar has localized and Arabized a successful business model that has already proven successful in the West.

"One of the challenges is how we Arabize millions of products, product descriptions, build a proper catalogue index, but that's our edge," he says.

He walks into the "war room" where another team is watching large computer monitors in the lead up to the start of White Friday.

"We have screens to see traffic, sales, Twitter feeds, what customers are saying," he says.

Saudi Arabia is big on Twitter but in Egypt the favored communication tool is Facebook. The team follows all the social media feeds in real time for feedback on what customers are saying about quality and price.

For Mouchawar, e-commerce is a platform that can build a new Middle East. It could create badly needed jobs for young people and boost the businesses that are the backbone of Arab economies.

"If you see where the jobs are, it's got to come from small and medium businesses," he says. E-commerce can provide distribution for these merchants for the first time and open markets across the Middle East.

"Imagine the access this merchant can have from a street in Cairo to a customer base in Saudi Arabia, to the UAE. If we can connect all these dots, you will have an incredible customer base."

He explains that the company handles the "last mile" deliveries even to places with no dependable mail service or a postal address.

Mouchawar met his goal of driving 10 million users to the website with White Friday sales, partnering with product giants including Microsoft, Apple, Samsung and Sony, to offer deep discounts. It's another step in building a brand.

The start-up culture took off in 2011, just as Egyptian protesters went to the streets of Tahrir Square in Cairo. That energy for political change has been diverted and exhausted. The tech revolution continues as the more promising Arab Spring.

Middle East

Dubai

Fast-food workers rallied around the country Thursday, calling for a minimum wage of $15 an hour. But in suburban Detroit, a small but growing fast-casual burger and chicken chain has already figured out how to pay higher wages and still be profitable.

When Moo Cluck Moo opened its first location almost two years ago, the starting pay for all workers was $12 an hour. The idea, according to co-founder Brian Parker, was to train everyone to multitask.

No one is just flipping burgers. All of the workers are expected to be jacks-of-all-trades: They bake buns from scratch daily, they house-make aioli and prepare made-to-order grass-fed burgers and free-range chicken sandwiches.

And, now, says Parker, the investment is paying off. Revenue is up at the chain's two locations. And workers are sticking around. And their pay now? It's up to $15 an hour. By comparison, a typical fast-food worker in the U.S. makes about $8 or $9 an hour.

"Because of our low turnover, and the fact that people are really into their jobs, $15 an hour wasn't a big stretch," Parker says.

Parker says there are savings in not having to constantly train new hires, and his workers are empowered because they're given so much responsibility.

The Salt

Across The Country, Fast-Food Workers Rally For $15-An-Hour Pay

When we stopped in for a visit this week, manager Dan Chavez was standing at the grill preparing a made-to-order Moo Burger. He has been cooking in restaurants for 15 years, so he knows how to move quickly from the grill to the fryer. He also oversees baking and talks to customers.

"It's more fun than I've had at other jobs, because we get to do everything ourselves," he says.

And Chavez says the higher-than-average wages are a big part of his job satisfaction.

"It feels good just to be able to pay my bills and enjoy a little of life," Chavez says.

In the beginning, Parker wasn't sure the higher wages would be sustainable. But now the restaurants are thriving. "We're ... going to show a profit in the last quarter," Parker says. And he and his partner are planning to add new locations.

Now, in order to make this model work, customers have to pay a little more.

Grass-fed Moo Burgers on a homemade bun start at about $6. This compares to a Big Mac, which retails in the U.S. for about $4.80. That's a price differential of just over a dollar.

In starting the company, the founders say, they were motivated by the lack of options. "We couldn't find an affordable place to take our kids and grandkids that didn't have hormones, preservatives," they write on the company's website.

They now vet their suppliers to make sure all the food they buy meets their specifications, and they source their beef from Joseph Decuis Wagyu Farm in Indiana.

"We're building a brand," Parker says. And part of getting Moo Cluck Moo out there is telling people about its sourcing of beef and chicken, and talking about its commitment to paying people a living wage.

"I'm not driving around in a six-figure sports car," Parker says. But he does have his eye on the future.

So are small burger chains like Moo Cluck Moo — which are willing to pay workers more and serve more upscale menus — going to put pressure on the giants such as McDonald's and Burger King to raise wages?

"No, I don't think so," says Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute.

Strain says there are two different models here, and two different kinds of customers. These new chains appeal to people who are willing to pay more for food prepared from scratch. But, he says, traditional fast-food chains are not going to go away.

"McDonald's appeals to people who like the Dollar Menu, and to people for whom that price point is appealing," he says.

And McDonald's will likely continue to offer its Dollar Menu, and other value pricing, as long as it can find people who are willing to work for the kind of wages it currently offers.

But if workers become too expensive, Strain argues, we'll start to see more automation — and fewer fast-food jobs.

"Imagine if some machine gets invented that can operate the french fry machine at McDonald's, " Strain says. That's one less worker needed at the fryer.

This automation has been happening for a while, Strain says. When he was a kid, it was a person — not a soda machine — that filled his cup.

fast food workers

With a backstory that includes heroin use and zipless you-know-whats, Wild is a daring foray for its star and producer, the usually prim Reese Witherspoon. As an excursion into the untamed stream of human consciousness, however, the movie is less bold.

Wild was adapted by About a Boy man Nick Hornby from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, the best-selling 2012 memoir by Cheryl Strayed. (The former Cheryl Nyland's adopted surname is her pithiest literary accomplishment.) Versatile Canadian filmmaker Jean-Marc Vallee, who directed Dallas Buyers Club, treats the tale as something of a cinematic fever dream. But the movie, unlike a genuine nightmare, usually telegraphs its next disturbing vision.

The fragmented narrative begins on the trail, where Witherspoon's Cheryl is having a disagreement with a long-distance hiker's most important companions: her boots. She's making painfully slow progress on her California-to-Oregon quest, in part because she's carrying far too much gear. But the principal obstructions are frequent flashbacks, which reveal the traumas Cheryl seeks to walk away from.

On the trail, Cheryl faces hunger, thirst, injury, men who might be rapists or murderers, and the inevitable rattlesnake. (The rest of the fauna is unfailingly cute.) In her pre-hike life, she experienced divorce, drug abuse, anonymous sex and — above all — the death of her beloved mother from cancer at 45.

As Cheryl's upbeat and "unsophisticated" mom, Bobbi, Laura Dern is the only supporting player who matters. Bobbi is Cheryl's true soul mate, and only becomes more so as a late-blooming student of feminism and women's literature. (Yes, mother and daughter do hesitantly discuss Fear of Flying.)

Dern and Witherspoon are just nine years apart in age, but lighting and makeup help the latter appear younger when the two are on screen together. The actresses also establish an interesting psychological contrast, with Cheryl as the one who can't get past her disappointments and Bobbi as the one who doggedly can and has.

Like many writers, Cheryl defines herself by what she reads. Her absurdly oversized backpack is heavy with books, and she writes lines of Frost and Whitman in the trail logbooks where hikers sign in. The literary quotations help shape her reputation as "the queen of the Pacific Crest Trail," although being a lone woman probably has more to do with it.

Along with snippets of memories, mostly bad, come scraps of dozens of songs, from the Shangri-las and the Hollies to Leonard Cohen and multiple renditions of Simon and Garfunkel's "El Condor Pasa" and (of course) "Homeward Bound." One nice touch is that recorded versions of the tunes are largely restricted to flashbacks; on the trail, they're sung or hummed by the characters.

Many of the songs are from the 1960s, but the death of Jerry Garcia locates the story in 1995, and '90s pop-grunge star Art Alexakis has a cameo as the inker who gives Cheryl and her ex their matching divorce-day tattoos. (There is a bit of so-hip-it-hurts Portlandia in Strayed's latter-day-hippie odyssey.)

Vallee periodically emulates the styles of Alain Resnais and Nicolas Roeg, whose frantic editing simulated mental disorientation with stunning intensity. Yet the final psychological set piece, when Cheryl can no longer suppress memories of a grisly act, is tidy even at its most hallucinatory.

The movie is closer to such recent backwoods misadventures as 127 Hours and Into the Wild, whose menace only brushed against madness. If Wild is an interesting trek, for both its star and its viewers, it's hardly a feral one.

This post was updated at 11:10 a.m. ET for clarity.

How would you — or do you — identify on online dating sites? Gay? Straight? Bisexual? Well you're about to have many more options on OkCupid, one of the most popular sites for people seeking love and connection.

OkCupid has about 4 million users, and within the next few weeks the site will give all of them brand-new options for specifying their gender and sexual orientation — options like androgynous, asexual, genderqueer and questioning.

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"Young people like the idea of fluidity," says psychology professor Ritch Savin-Williams. He runs Cornell University's Sex and Gender Lab and studies identity and relationships. He says young people are far more likely to look beyond gender binaries and see sexual orientation on a continuum.

"I think the new categories are pretty great," says a 21-year-old TJ. That's the name on his OkCupid profile. TJ has checked off OkCupid's boxes for straight and male because those are closest to how he sees himself. But with the new options, TJ says he'll probably identify as trans man, transsexual and transmasculine, meaning he's a masculine man born biologically female. He also plans to update his sexual orientation to queer and heteroflexible, which means he mostly goes for girls — with exceptions. (Right now, all of those terms are in TJ's written profile. That's been the only space users have had to express more nuanced gender and sexual identity.)

Mike Maxim, chief technology officer at OkCupid, says the dating site wasn't originally designed to handle dozens of terms and hundreds of variables. "The site was definitely constructed around, you know, just men and then women; and, you know, men ... looking for women."

And of course women looking for men. Some of these new identifiers won't appeal to a huge market, but Maxim says why leave people out? And why not add a little cutting-edge cachet by helping to bring a new lexicon into the mainstream? Still, adding so many new terms was a technical challenge.

"That was probably the primary reason we haven't done this earlier," Maxim says. "You know, this has been a feature that's been requested now for, I don't know, years."

And OkCupid isn't alone. Earlier this year, Facebook added more than 50 new terms for selecting gender identity. But terms can fall in and out of fashion. Savin-Williams notes that "bicurious," which used to be a fairly commonplace identifier on dating sites, is now considered uncool. And he hears new vocabulary all the time, like while teaching a gender and identity workshop at a high school.

All Tech Considered

Facebook Gives Users New Options To Identify Gender

"One young woman defined herself as 'squiggly,' " he says. "And there was silence and everyone was saying, 'What exactly is that?' And then she said, 'Well, I feel like that's what I am in terms of my gender and sexuality. I'm squiggly.' A lot of people began to shake their heads and said, 'Yeah, that's pretty good. I feel that way too.' "

OkCupid doesn't currently plan to add squiggly to any of its categories, but single NPR fans, please take note: Apparently, sapiosexual, which refers to people who are attracted to intelligence, is one of its most popular new terms.

gender identity

OkCupid